Patterns of geographic mobility over the 19th century are examined and compared to contemporary rates. The results show that rates of interstate migration were high in the first half of the nineteenth century, fell through 1900, and rose to current levels after 1950. The economic correlates of migration to the frontier between 1850 and 1860 are than assessed. The study asks how many people actually moved to the west, how many of them were poor, unskilled workers, and how did the subsequent economic performance of migrants compare to that of non-migrants using more than 5,000 males linked across the 1850-70 federal censuses. It finds substantial migration to the frontier by urban residents, particularly unskilled workers, and substantial gains in wealth for these migrants. Those who moved to the frontier were generally of lower average quality than those who stayed behind, lending further support to the view of the frontier as a "safety valve."

The recent demography of the Hispanic population of the United States has received considerable attention, but historical perspective is more elusive partly due to data limitations. A nationally representative sample of the Hispanic population of the United States, based on the manuscripts of the 1910 census, now exists that includes 71,500 Hispanic-origin persons plus another 24,000 of their non-Hispanic neighbors. We estimate childhood mortality for 1890 to 1910, using indirect demographic methods of estimation and find infant and child mortality in the Hispanic population that was higher than for the non-Hispanic whites but slightly lower than for nonwhite, non-Hispanics (mostly African Americans). Hispanic rural, farm populations in California, Texas, and Arizona did the best, though still experiencing high mortality. The usual advantage of rural residence at the turn of the century holds outside of New Mexico and Florida.

This paper investigates the social and economic circumstances of childhood that predict the probability of survival to age 85 among African-Americans. It uses a unique study design in which survivors are linked to their records in U.S. Censuses of 1900 and 1910. A control group of age and race-matched children is drawn from Public Use Samples for these censuses. It concludes that the factors most predictive of survival are farm background, having literate parents, and living in a two-parent household. Results support the interpretation that death risks are positively correlated over the life cycle.

The report provides a 1996 estimate of renter housing demand and supply in Georgia's 159 counties. The report was prepared under contract to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs, Office of Affordable Housing Development.

Presents a statistical analysis of newly available data to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between long-term unemployment among elderly workers and retirement. Such an understanding is necessary to resolve conflicting claims about the labor force participation rate of males over 65 between 1870 and 1937. Clear changes in the working lives of older men occurred in the late 19th century; participation rates for this group showed a clear downward trend between 1880 and 1940.

This paper estimates the proportion of savings that represents accumulation for retirement in the United States over the last century. For this purpose, I compute a counterfactual life cycle savings-income ratio for 1900-1990 that would have resulted if the savings for retirement were the only motive for wealth accumulation. The proportion of private savings that represents life cycle wealth accumulation increased over time, particularly after 1940. I argue that about half of the wealth stock in the U.S. resulted from life cycle savings.

This paper estimates the proportion of savings that represents accumulation for retirement in the United States over the last century. For this purpose, I compute a counterfactual life cycle savings-income ratio for 1900-1990 that would have resulted if the savings for retirement were the only motive for wealth accumulation. The proportion of private savings that represents life cyclewealth accumulation increased over time, particularly after 1940. I argue that about half of the wealth stock in the U.S. resulted from life cycle savings.

This paper estimates the impact of male immigration on wages and employment of native-born male workers. The papers contribution to the existing literature is the introduction of explicit controls for native net internal migration. The results suggest that migration controls are significant and must be included in any cross-sectional regional analysis that attempts to obtain unbiased estimates of the impact of immigration on native labor market outcomes. Although the effects of immigration on native wages and employment continue, in most cases, to be small and/or insignificant, in many instances the net migration control is found to be responsible for changing the significance and/or sign (from positive to negative) of the relationship.

Mining of association rules has been found useful in many applications. Many previous works focused on the basket (binary) association rules, which is in the form of 'The transactions show that there are many customers who purchase product A will purchase the product B'. All the products are treated uniformly, and all the rules are mined based on the counts of the products. However, in the social science research, the analysts may want to mine the rules based on the importance of the products...

Mining of association rules has been found useful in many applications. Many previous works focused on the basket (binary) association rules, which is in the form of "The transactions show that there are many customers who purchase product A will purchase the product B." All the products are treated uniformly, and all the rules are mined based on the counts of products. However, in the social science research, the analysts may want to mine the rules based on the importance of the products, items or attributes. For example, total income attribute is more interesting than the height of a person in a household. Based on this, we generalize this to the case where the items are given weights to reflect the importance to the users. As the downward closure property of the support measure in the mining of association rules no longer exists, previous algorithms cannot be applied. In this thesis, we make use of a metric, called support bounds, in the mining of binary and qualitative (fuzzy) association rules. Furthermore, we introduce the simple sample method and the data maintenance method, based on a statistical approach, to mine the rules. Experiments show that by using the weights, we can prune these items without any interest at an earlier step, and hence saving time in mining of these association rules.

Secondary-school enrollment and graduation rates increased spectacularly in muchof the United States from 1910 to 1940; the advance was particularly rapid from1920 to 1935 in the nonsouthern states. This increase was uniquely American; noother nation underwent an equivalent change for several decades. States that rapidlyexpanded their high school enrollments early in the period had greater wealth, morehomogeneity of wealth, and less manufacturing activity than others. Factorsprompting the expansion include the substantial returns to education early in thecentury and a responsive "state." This work is based on a newly constructed stateleveldata set.

In this article we test whether the United States has evolved an "hourglass economy" characterized by a proliferation of jobs at the top and the bottom of the wage distribution for those with high and low educations, but few jobs in the middle for those with modest educational attainments. Rather than considering the distribution of actual wages, we examine the distribution of occupational wages:the average wages attached to detailed occupational categories. Using data from the 1950, 1970, and 1990 PUMS files, we compare distributions of occupational wages for men and women in 1949, 1969, and 1989. We find that the experience of men generally conforms to the hourglass metaphor: after 1969, the structure of male occupational wages polarized and began to assume the shape of an hourglass, with one's position in the hierarchy depending largely on education. For women, however, the hourglass metaphor fails. The distribution of occupational wages in 1989 remains pyramidal in shape, and position is not as strongly connected to schooling as among men.

Progressivism, James Connolly shows us, was a language and style of political action available to a wide range of individuals and groups. A diverse array of political and civic figures used it to present themselves as leaders of a communal response to the growing power of illicit interests and to the problems of urban-industrial life. As structural reforms weakened a ward-based party system that helped mute ethnic conflict, this new formula for political mobilization grew more powerful. Its most effective variation in Boston was an "ethnic progressivism" that depicted the city's public life as a clash between its immigrant majority"the people"and a wealthy Brahmin elite"the interests." As this portrayal took hold, Bostonians came to view their city as a community permanently beset by ethnic strife.In showing that the several reform visions that arose in Boston included not only the progressivism of the city's business leaders but also a series of ethnic progressivisms, Connolly offers a new approach to urban public life in the early twentieth century. He rejects the assumption that ethnic politics was machine politics and employs both institutional and rhetorical analysis to reconstruct the inner workings of neighborhood public life and the social narratives that bound the city together. The result is a deeply textured picture that differs sharply from the traditional view of machine-reform conflict.